del c:\ /f /s

Just got back from my first visit to my a colleague of mine's restaurant called "What the Pho" The restaurant is actually run/owned by his brother, Lan Nguyen, but Son was there serving today. He took our whole department out to lunch and served us as well! They have extremely good noodle soup and appetizers, and everything is very new and clean. They do dine in and take out, and their hours are M-Thr 10a-9p, F-S 10a-10p, Sun 10a-9p. The restaurant is located at 2442 Pleasant Hill Road, Duluth, GA 30096. They are at the corner of Pleasant Hill Road and Steve Reynolds Blvd. The phone number is 678-754-6424.

I've always thought it would be very cool to see how much freely available data on the internet could be mined by an automated, free-roving, intelligent agent. I've tried a few times to get started designing something like that, but I always try and design too large of a system the first time through. That process just causes me to get bored, and makes me want to move on to something else. I need to get into the habit of doing small, fast iterations. It's so hard for me to produce something that falls way short of my ultimate goal. I know I need to look at it like a step on the way to my grand idea, but I can't ever keep that in mind while I'm in the middle of something.

In the search for improving data quality at our company, I found a government site that maintains a list of all the known populated areas in the US, and their proper names. The site is part of the USGS (US Geological Survey) agency, and it is called the Geographic Names Information System . We can use this data to help us give the properly cased names for cities, and counties. We currently use a system by Vertex Inc. called Sales Tax for L Series, to get sales tax information for specific locations. A side benefit of this software is that we can do ZIP code to City/County/State mapping, and vice-versa. The only problem with this system is that all of the City/County/State names are in UPPER CASE. By joining that data to the GNIS data, we can properly case all of the names for free.

Found this fairly comprehensive listing of Home Theater PC related items.

I made some configuration changes to the WebSphere server that is hosting our eBusiness application. I changed the WebContainer thread count to something more reasonable (Min 7) than what it was (Min 300), and I also set the initial java heap size to be 250 MB instead of the 32 it was at, since the server is hanging around the 100 MB to 300 MB range. We'll see if those changes have any effect.

I got some more good news from our DataStage team about the changes I made to the ODBC driver. Someone who had a job that was running at about 75 rows per second before my change now is running at 200 rows per second. It seems that simply enabling connection pooling for the ODBC driver gave us about a 25% increase in speed. You gotta love that.

Part of the build quality problem I mentioned yesterday had to do with the fact that changes are getting promoted to our test and production environments that aren't supposed to be. Our source control system is based in ClearCase, and we are using UCM. We have our projects set up where there is a stream that cooresponds loosely to the code that is in productions, and then we have developer streams under that stream. If there is a feature/enhancement, then we create streams for those features/enhancements under the main stream, and then developers join under that feature stream to work on it. What happens is that developers sometimes make fixes in the feature streams, instead of the top level streams, and thereby tie thier fixes to feature code that isn't really ready to go up. To prevent this from happening in the future, the project manager for that team wants to prevent developers from creating thier own activities, and she is intituting a policy of more thorough c...